I’ve left three companies I founded or was cofounder there of. I think one thing that drives a lot of founders to leave is how others in the company, especially non-founders, start to focus only on money. Certainly that’s important but often the reason these companies start or become successful is due to the founders focus on offering a innovative and attractive solution or service to some problem or issue. So once a founders idea, product, service or what have you becomes “real” some companies start to hyper focus on commoditization, sales, marketing and forget that you need to keep innovating not just iterativley improving if you really want change. Yet change is inherently risky which bothers the more sales, marketing, and finance people. They often attempt to manage the founder or founders, sometime with darn good reason, to actually keep them from creating to much change, radically diffrent systems or products and the like. For some of us that sort of constraining atmosphere is incredibly frustrating and annoying where our needs to explore, experiment, take risks, challange the status quo, and innovate and constantly punished. Hence we tend to leave. The company then often loses that voice and the champions of innovation. There are many good examples such as Apple. There are also contra example where companies do just fine or better after getting rid of their founder. The best companies though foster a continuously adapting organization that either knows how or activley learns how to apply innovation and their founders ideas and ethos while mainting a healthy focus on being a business. It’s not a trival thing too do but those companies that manage to tend to be the companies that survive well after the founders are gone, they are the places where people enjoy working, and they are the ones who have the most impact.

So more details of the Chinese story on collecting DNA from Uighurs in China have emerged. Sounds like they are collecting not just DNA but other biometrics including iris, voice, fingerprints, and the like. More worrisome is the connection to a US academic, Kenneth Kidd PHD a well know Yale geneticist, who has been seminal in the use of DNA evidence in criminal cases. Worse is it seems the Chinese may have been developing techniques to differentiate Uighurs from other groups leading some credence to the idea that Chinese may use DNA testing and databases to specifically target ethnic minorities. This coupled with their increasingly Orwellian surveillance state is pretty disturbing. I would not be surprised as well if China starts offering such capabilities to other countries to suppress their people, as well of course to allow the Chinese to spy on them as well.

If you are like me and use Jupyter notebooks and virtual environments when doing research, proof of concept, or just creating scratch code you have probably run into the issue where you have installed various libraries into your Python instance and virtual environment yet when you run Jupyter notebook those libraries won’t load. This happens to me about every 3 or 4 months because I forget such things easily. Apparently, I am not the only one 🙂 While there are a variety of ways to solve this issue the best way, I think, is to create a new kernel for each virtual environment so that when you run a virtual environment, then run jupyter notebook it will either start with the right virtual instance of your python environment kernel or you can simply use the Jupyter Kernel dropdown to pick the right environment. To do this you can use the conda command like this:

Where other-env is the name of the specific environment you want to create an ipython notebook kernel for. This should solve your problems without having to resort to simlinks, updating your path vars, hardcoding paths, etc.

Really cool video and explanation of how space junk can be collected by using a “harpoon.” Space debris is a increasingly worrisome problem that effects space based telecommunications, science, space travel, and defense.